


so much less than we were

by portions_forfox



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-18
Updated: 2012-08-18
Packaged: 2017-11-12 09:23:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portions_forfox/pseuds/portions_forfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lavender deserved better: the fanfic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so much less than we were

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luvscharlie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvscharlie/gifts).



> Written for the [hp_getlucky](http://hp-getlucky.livejournal.com) fest at Livejournal. Prompt was from luvscharlie, _Lavender's tired of playing second fiddle._

I wanted to believe in all the words that I was speaking  
As we moved together in the dark  
  
  
///  


Looking back, he'd say the easiest part of it all was brushing it off once it was over.

"I was angry," he could say, and it would be true.  "Jealous," and it'd be even truer.  Hermione would smile and her eyes would do that thing, that thing he likes where they sort of crinkle at the edges and go all golden.

"Well," she'd whisper, soft, low, "it turned out all right in the end, didn't it?" It was just far enough off-character to throw him the tiniest bit, but then again she was always a bit off-character right before she leaned in to kiss him.

So ultimately--and Christ, for once in his life--the simplest part to handle was the aftermath.  "I was being stupid and arrogant and I wanted someone to shag so I could rub it in your face," he told Hermione, his voice humble and his head down low.  She forgave him after about the tenth time (or maybe the eleventh.  This was Hermione Granger, after all).

He told his mum and Ginny that it had just been "a fling," and they nodded, casting knowing smiles across the table at each other.  He even laughed with Harry and the twins about the whole affair--"Lav-Lav and Won-Won--oh God, I must've been drunk the whole time!"

But he's figured out by now that it's never that simple.

(There was this time, this one time when he and Lavender had stayed up late snogging by the fireplace after everyone had already gone to bed, and he pulled away for just a second to catch his breath and before he could move in again he stopped, because there she was.  There she was, and her cheeks were flushed from kissing, and her eyes were bright and round, and all the lines around her face were soft from firelight.

"What?" she said, and he was overcome with this overwhelming sense of panic, because he realized just then--realized with such an acute desperation--that she was more real, she was there, she was a girl.)

 

 

 

 

It begins (and it ends) like this:

She starts off the story, first, at an insignificant evening meal in the Great Hall some winter weekend.  (Dinners for him and Lavender, Ron realizes, are really just the interim between snogging and snogging some more, and he supposes she has the right to squeeze in as much personal information as she likes during that one hour or so.)

When Lavender was only a little girl, she used to stay in the makeshift day-care at St. Mungo's where her mother worked.  There were about twenty kids there, all the little children who belonged to Healers whose spouses weren't around for childrearing during the day.  There was a little boy--he was five and she was four--whose name was Alberto Durone.  He was a handsome child, with silky blonde hair and pale, dainty hands, the kind that other mothers stopped to fawn over before remembering their own, inferior offspring (a Harry Potter, if you will).  Alberto was the unattainable goal of every female toddler in the center, gorgeous and precocious and adored by all.

One fateful day, Alberto fancied Lavender his girlfriend.  He painted her a less-than-favorable depiction of their loathsome caretaker, Ms. Bruno, in Muggle watercolors. Lavender laughed--a high, giggly sound--and for that day, she and Alberto were more in love than any two five-year-olds had ever been before.

But by the time Lavender's mother came to take her home, Alberto had already developed the seven-hour itch, and his wandering eye couldn't help but linger on little Song Li's shiny black mane.  Lavender cried for three days straight.  She still counts him as her first love.

The story doesn't cap off there.  Which, Ron reckons, sort of makes sense, in that weird, sentimental kind of way.

 

 

 

 

Parvati said there was this time, this one time when she and Lavender were just leaving the dormitory on their way to dinner and giggling about one thing or another--Marietta Edgecombe's hair going static in Transfiguration, yes, that must've been it--when suddenly Lavender stopped short of the door, the grin on her face frozen but fading slowly.

"What?" said Parvati.  "What is it?"

Lavender turned on her heel, and Parvati followed her eyeline to Hermione Granger, sitting alone on the windowsill and watching the snow fall, soft, silent.  They'd taken to just ignoring her lately.

"Just leave her," Parvati hissed.  "It's what she  _likes_ , isn't it?"

But Lavender didn't listen.  Parvati said she walked right over to the window, tapped Hermione on the shoulder, exchanged a few quiet words ... Something like,  _You all right, Hermione?_ drifted over ... And then the conversation was over as abruptly as it had begun, and Lavender was yanking Parvati straight out the door to dinner once again.

"What'd she say?" mumbled Parvati.

"'No,'" said Lavender.

 

 

 

 

 

"She's not exactly the tallest wand in the shop, is she?" George ventured over evening snacks in the Burrow.  Summer lit the backdrop of sun over hillside, and Hermione's face was framed with yellow light.  A halo.

"Her mum works at St. Mungo's, remember?" Fred posed between colossal bites of mashed potatoes and Molly's thick, warm gravy.  "In the crazies' wing, yeah?"

"Huh.  'Splains a lot," Ginny giggled.

Hermione leaned her head away from Ron's shoulder, arms still wrapped around his neck as her head tilted so shadows flickered across the dips in her collarbone.  "Oh, stop it, you lot!" she reprimanded, swatting Fred's arm.  "Lavender's never done anything to you!"

Despite the allegations, Ron Weasley was not so oblivious.  He noticed things, noticed things about Hermione, and she had this way, he'd decided, of saying one thing with words and another with her eyes.

"It's easy to think of her as silly, isn't it?" Luna breathed, quiet eyes drifting up to the ceiling, a glazed-over smile on her lips.  "Very easy."

_Thank you_ , said Ron,  _Thank you, Luna_ , but not out loud.

Hermione's fingers were hot on his neck.

 

 

 

 

 

"Shall we go to Honeyduke's next?" Lavender gushed, "or the Three Broomsticks for a free couples' drink?"

Ron is thinking,  _Hermione drank pumpkin juice for breakfast this morning_.  She was sitting with Harry that day, and the bastard kept moving his fat head in Ron's line of vision, telling her something, something  _ever so important_ and Harry-Potter-related ("Bless his heart," as Ron's mum would say).  But for once, she wasn't listening, not really.  She kept blowing huffs of air out from between her pursed lips, so her cheeks puffed up and her hair lifted off her forehead in wisps.

"...Ron?  Ron.   _Ron_!" Lavender was saying, and he noticed her there, round cheeks and nose red from the chilly wind and snow.  She looked rather lovely in that moment.

"You're not listening to me, are you?" she said, and no he's not, and before she grabs his hand and whirls them back around he notices her noticing and sees she isn't stupid, not at all.

 

 

 

 

 

On second thought, maybe it begins (and it ends) like this:

"I love you, Hermione."

A blush.  A smile.  "Don't let Lavender hear you saying that."

Hot hands on hot skin and the shaking touch of Hermione's wet lips on the corner of his mouth--she has this way of just missing him, just missing his lips when she's nervous--and his fingers curling slowly over the bump on the small of her back--bones, he could feel her bones beneath her skin.  Firelight was soft and there were shadows on her neck, flickering across the dips in her collarbone, and if he'd thought about it more he would've been nervous, nervous out of his fucking mind, but since he was Ron Weasley he tended not to think much in the heat of a moment--instead all he thought was,  _I'd like to kiss that_ , so he did, he kissed the shadows away, and Hermione gasped--a tiny, girlish noise that seemed entirely out-of-character--and really, really that was the end (and the beginning).

And so it was that the girl he'd picked to slight the woman became the woman slighted.  He might call it ironic, if his understanding of the word weren't as crystal clear as it was (Hermione, thanks).  Irony is a muddied thing, and somewhere along the way he'd muddied it even more by the fact that he knew something Hermione did not, god save us all, which was this:

Lavender Brown was real. She was there. She was a girl.

 

 

 

 

"Ron," says Hermione, and her hipbones are just the same as her collarbone, shadows and all, especially when she's moving, rocking, "God, what were you thinking?" And she's laughing now, she's laughing now that they're safe in the Burrow and summer lights the backdrop of stars over hillside, and it feels sick.  It feels wrong.

He seems to be the only one who realizes it wasn't fair.

 

 

 

 

Lavender is crying.  He's not about to stop her.

"I'm not stupid, you know," she whispers, and it's funny, she's not yelling--she has every right to draw everyone's attention to this injustice, to her heroic plight--but she won't, not this time.  She is utterly humiliated.  "I'm not."

He could pretend he didn't know till now how  _not stupid_ she is.  He could pretend he'd been that savvy, or that fair.  He could pretend.  But he won't, not this time.

"I know."

"I just--" She's wiping tears off her nose, her voice is shaking, and God, she isn't stupid, she is so very very _not stupid ..._ She's a pretty crier, Lavender.  He'd never have thought.  "I know I haven't exactly got the best track record.  I know I'm not the girl ... the girl that ..." She trails off.  She doesn't have to say it, not if she doesn't want to.  "I guess I just--I really thought I'd gotten lucky this time, you know?" she says, her blue eyes rising to meet his.  Eyes are so much clearer when there are tears in them, Ron decides.  "With you."

He'll pretend it had been so much less than it was.

 

 

 

 

"We've really gotten lucky," says Hermione, her low voice muffled by her lips against his neck.  "...You and I."

Maybe not.


End file.
